You’d think a hegemony with a 100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy against major non-democratic players, would have some mechanism that would prevent itself from throwing down it’s key ideology.
Is it really that the president is all that decides about the future of democracy itself? Is 53 out of 100 senate seats really enough to make country fall into authoritarian regime? Is the army really not constitutionally obliged to step in and save the day?
I’d never think that, of all places, American democracy would be the most volatile.
The mechanism was the election.
I mean, sure, impeachment and whatnot, but it’s not like people didn’t know who this guy was. I can give other institutions a whole bunch of crap for not getting rid of the guy the first time, but when you’ve given him a Supreme Court supermajority, both chambers of Congress and the presidency AFTER he attempted a coup I’m gonna say that’s on you, guys.
That’s making the very bold assumption that there was no interference in said election. In fact, we know for a fact that there was, we just don’t know the extent of the interference and whether it changed the outcome. The reason we don’t know is because it wasn’t investigated (or if it was, it wasn’t publicized), so I’m going to take the stance that it’s very possibly on the outgoing administration, actually, for not making a bigger stink about it.